Alaska named most dangerous state for wildfires
Published 4:30 am Wednesday, July 22, 2026
New analysis has revealed that Alaska is the most dangerous state in the country for wildfires, burning over 2,200 acres for every fire it records — the highest figure in the nation by a wide margin.
Ladah Injury & Car Accident Lawyers Las Vegas examined Insurance Information Institute wildfire records drawn from the National Interagency Fire Center and state wildfire agencies, covering all 50 states from 2020 to 2024, which showed that Alaska burns 2,207.1 acres per fire, nearly 19 times the national average of 118.5 acres per fire.
Each state was ranked by total acres burned divided by total fires, measuring how much land a single fire consumed rather than how often fires start. Alaska recorded just 2,051 fires over the five years, yet burned 4,526,853 acres, the second most of any state.
Alaska’s five-year total rests almost entirely on 2022, when 3,110,976 acres burned from only 595 fires, better than two-thirds of everything that burned in the five years, at an extreme rate of 5,228.5 acres per fire.
Every other year was minor in comparison, but even the quietest, 2020 at 519.1 acres per fire, would rank among the most severe figures in the Lower 48.
“The state records comparatively few fires, fewer than 500 in a typical year, but each one burns across an average of more than two thousand acres of remote boreal forest and tundra, terrain where fires can run for weeks with no road, no crew and no reason to stop them,” the analysis read. “No other state in the country loses so much land per fire.”
Alaska’s 2,207.1 acres per fire is almost double the figure of second-place Kansas and more than five times that of tenth-place California.
Ramzy Ladah, founder and CEO of Ladah Injury & Car Accident Lawyers Las Vegas, said that the numbers describe scale, not blame.
“A state can record very few fires and still lose hundreds of thousands of acres in a single season,” he said. “For households in high severity states, that means evacuation planning, insurance records, and defensible space matter long before smoke appears on the horizon.”
Alaska belongs to a small group of states where the danger comes not from the frequent fires but from the size of the rare ones.
Its five-year total was fewer than New Jersey and Alabama, yet burned more total acreage than every state except California.
